Daniel Patrick Moynihan, R.I.P.
By W. James Antle III
web posted March 31, 2003
Politics is seldom thought of as an intellectual pursuit. More
often, wags describe it as show business for ugly people. Former
Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) was a rarity: a true
intellectual and policy wonk (as opposed to policy wonk poseur)
who succeeded in the rough-and-tumble world of electoral
politics, in New York of all places.
Tributes to most deceased political figures almost write
themselves. The typical public officeholder dedicated their career
to one or two major issues, or was associated with one or two
major accomplishments. Moynihan isn't easily classified or
described. In researching this article, I found that obituaries were
not even always in agreement about basic biographical facts.
Was he raised in Manhattan's "Hell's Kitchen" or wasn't he?
Was he 10 when his father his deserted their family or was he
six? Was he a "liberal stalwart" or someone whose views were
outside the conventional left-right spectrum?
Early life took Moynihan from Tulsa, Oklahoma to Indiana to the
Lower East Side of Manhattan. After his heavy drinking father
walked out on them, Moynihan began earning money as a
shoeshine boy while his mother supported the family by running a
saloon near Times Square. He graduated first in his class at
Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem, but could not yet
afford higher education. He went to work on the docks and
eventually was able to begin attending City College. After joining
the U.S. Navy in 1944, he was able to attend Tufts on the G.I.
Bill. He won a Fulbright scholarship to attend the London School
of Economics. Soon after he began his career of juggling politics
and academia, teaching at Harvard and Syracuse while advising
a series of political leaders beginning with Averell Harriman in
1955.
At the center of Pat Moynihan's storied career was a remarkable
paradox: As a scholar and advisor to every president from
Kennedy to Ford, he was an innovative thinker who was
frequently dubious about the claims and excesses of modern
liberalism. As a participant in electoral politics, particularly during
his four Senate terms, he was a conventional liberal who seldom
deviated from the Democratic party line.
When effective conservative opposition to the left was still in its
infancy, Moynihan was busily and often controversially pointing
out the flaws in liberal thought. Yet when these policies came
under serious challenge first from President Ronald Reagan in the
1980s and then a Republican Congress led by Newt Gingrich in
the 1990s, he hugged what was left of the New Deal consensus
tightly and was an obstacle to reform. He was first elected to the
Senate in 1976 by defeating movement conservative James
Buckley, brother of William F., in the general election. And one
of the final acts of his Senate career was his famous "torch-
passing" press conference with Hillary Clinton that was probably
more responsible than any other single factor for her being a
senator from New York today. Obituaries alternate between
describing him as a neoconservative and an unrepentant New
Deal liberal, but all recognize him as a leading Democrat.
A couple years ago, the writer Steve Sailer remarked that "true
neoconservative politicians are practically nonexistent - as
opposed to the Joe Liebermans and Daniel Patrick Moynihans
who talk like Irving Kristol but vote like Walter Mondale." But
unlike most other senators, Moynihan's ideas far outweigh the
significance of his voting record.
It was Moynihan, in a book entitled Beyond the Melting Pot
coauthored with Nathan Glazer, who pointed out the difficulties
of assimilating immigrant groups– two years before the 1965
immigration reform act that increased immigration without any
corresponding effort to increase our capacity for assimilation.
When the conventional wisdom was that welfare dependency
was wholly determined by unemployment rates and economic
conditions, Moynihan's 1965 report "The Negro Family: The
Case for National Action" pointed out the role played by family
breakdown. As a member of Lyndon Johnson's administration at
the outset of the Great Society/War on Poverty, he presciently
wrote about the collapse of the urban black family as something
then approaching "crisis level." Then the black illegitimacy rate
was 26 percent; today it stands at 33 percent among all
Americans and 69 percent among black Americans. We are
now acutely aware of illegitimacy's relationship with crime,
welfare dependency, drug abuse, educational failure and a whole
host of other pathologies and only beginning to reverse the tide.
As the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in the mid-
1970s, Moynihan forthrightly took on a collection of totalitarian
and radical Third World basket cases and articulately defended
American interests. He confronted the Soviets, denounced
Ugandan dictator Idi Amin as a "racist murderer," and described
an anti-Israel resolution equating Zionism with racism as
"obscene." He forthrightly criticized career diplomats for "an
incapacity for dealing with ideas" that led them to use their
protocols as "a substitute for ideas." In 1980, by then a senator,
he would predict the end of the Soviet Union (the only other
politician to do so was Reagan).
In 1993, Moynihan penned "Defining Deviancy Down" for The
American Scholar. Its premise was that a decline in standards
and the will to punish lesser criminal offenses promoted
lawlessness and social pathology. The failure of a society to
enforce its most basic legal and moral rules leads it to live in
denial about the criminal and deviant behavior that ensues,
encouraging still more of the same. Many of its observations
were incorporated into the successful crime-reduction strategies
implemented in parts of the United States later in the decade,
most famously Rudolph Giuliani's New York City.
Although he was then chairman of the Senate Finance
Committee, Moynihan refused to be bullied into uncompromising
support of Bill Clinton's health care plan. He sought to inject
contrary views into the debate and chided Clinton that while we
did not truly have a health care crisis, the country was facing a
welfare crisis. This helped America avert Hillarycare and also
moved the welfare reform debate forward, although Moynihan
disappointingly opposed the landmark 1996 reform legislation in
Kennedy-like terms.
Thus, even as a mainstream Democratic senator Moynihan was
occasionally a source of common sense. In voting to ban partial-
birth abortion, he pointed out that the procedure was actually
closer to infanticide and provided pro-life forces with one of their
most memorable quotes. Despite his liberal record on Social
Security, he was willing to contemplate free-market reforms.
After leaving the Senate, he co-chaired President George W.
Bush's commission on Social Security reform and was a
supporter allowing Americans to invest a portion of their payroll
taxes, a policy frequently described as partial privatization.
But Moynihan was seldom more on target than with his
appraisals of his fellow liberals. The left, he stated, had
developed "the ability to immediately dissolve every statement of
fact into a question of motive." He pointed out, "Liberalism
faltered when it turned out it could not cope with truth." His
rebuke to messianic Great Society liberals - we thought we
could do anything. . . The central psychological proposition of
liberalism is that for every problem there is a solution" – is
especially relevant amid signs that optimistic conservatives may
be repeating the mistake of excessive faith in a set of prescribed
policy positions.
Such keen insights will last longer than a series of wrongheaded
Senate votes and a mostly unsuccessful fight to preserve New
Deal liberalism. Pat Moynihan will be missed because of his
service but also because of what he represented. As the
columnist George Will observed, "Along the way he wrote more
books than some of his colleagues read, and became something
that, like Atlantis, is rumored to have once existed but has not
recently been seen - the Democratic Party's mind."
W. James Antle III is a senior editor for Enter Stage Right.
Enter Stage Right -- http://www.enterstageright.com